Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Saturday November 09, 2013 @11:16AM
from the slight-problem-with-physics dept.

mdsolar writes with this bit of news from Green Tech Media "The German government has responded to the next big challenge in its energy transition – storing the output from the solar boom it has created — by doing exactly what it has successfully done to date: greasing the wheels of finance to bring down the cost of new technology. ... Now it is looking at bringing down the cost of the next piece in the puzzle of its energy transition — battery storage. ... KfW’s aim, according to Axel Nawrath, a member of the KfW Bankengruppe executive board, is to ensure that the output of wind and solar must be 'more decoupled' from the grid. ... This is seen as critical as the level of renewable penetration rises to around 40 per cent — a level expected in Germany within the next 10 years. ... According to Papenfuss, households participating in the scheme will spend between €20,000 and €28,000 on solar and storage, depending on the size of the system (the average size is expected to be around 7kW for the solar array and around 4kWh for the battery)."

Been saying we should have started doing this in the USA two decades ago when i worked home construction.

Every one of those subdivision mcmansion homes we have built should have come with a solar panel on the roof and 2 volt battery array.We built MILLIONS of them. Hell the people buying 40k homes for 200k+ you could have even sold it to them as a 'feature' and not subsidize it at all.

Between that and all the big box stores having an array on the roof. We could be powering half the entire country by solar now. And it would have cost less than a month of one of our 'wars'.

But no. Because socialisim or something. Or no wait. Solar is for hippies. Or no wait.. It's expensive. Or no wait. Solar sucks. Or no wait whats the excuse of the day now?We're dumb.

The reason is pretty simple. It's because if you add up all the costs, every study done by someone other than an environmental wacko group says PV solar is 2-5x more expensive per kWh generated [wikipedia.org] than other energy sources. I wish it weren't so, but PV solar is very much a technology which needs further R&D before widescale adoption. There are a few locations (e.g. desert southwest U.S.) where the abundance of sunlight makes it more feasible (though still not advantageous). But in general, outside of a

I wonder why you forgot to mention that solar is on a Moore's Law-like curve, and hence already cheaper today than some sources of energy in use today and expected to be cheaper than most sources of energy within a decade.

The problem with those stats is that they only look at the cost to build an operate each source, not the price that the consumer pays. In most countries solar is cheaper for the owner than electricity from the grid.

Germans are currently trying to organize referendums on nationalizing the grid and some sources of production. Once they control it they can make it work better for solar, reducing the cost even further. It will make other forms of generation cheaper too because they can run them non-profit. Why

I agree with the general drive towards decoupling immediate production vs. use with better energy storage, but even with improved battery technology, everyone having batteries in their house is a particularly inefficient (and high-maintenance) way of doing it. Better approaches need quite large sinks for excess energy. For example, pumped-storage hydro [wikipedia.org] is good for very large amounts. For medium-sized amounts, especially transient spikes, Denmark is experimenting with (PDF) [ramboll.com] dumping the excess production into district heating, since the heat reservoir handles fluctuations better than the grid does.

Better prediction and integration between sources can also help. For example, Denmark is largely managing its fluctuating wind energy these days not by literally storing it, but by predicting much of the variation, and offsetting discretionary production within the integrated Nordic energy market. What mostly happens is that on high-wind days, Sweden and Norway just reduce production at their hydro plants, and use the excess Danish wind power instead. In a sense the excess wind therefore gets stored as potential energy in the hydro reservoirs, but just by not producing the hydro in the first place, rather than pump-storage.

Well, traditional pumped storage is exhausted in germany. However there are concepts like cutting a huge cylinder out of a mountain and filling the hole with water, the stone cylinder is supposed to swim on this water and increase its pressure. (sorry, don't find a link for it).On the other hand germany still can build more pumped storages by simply creating artificial lakes on top of hills like this picture: http://www.dena.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Sonstiges/themen/esd_2.jpg [www.dena.de]

Batteries are not likely to ever be cost competitive to pumped hydro for grid-scale energy storage. Although the initial capital costs can be similar (if we can get enough lead for multi-GWh battery banks), the overall operating cost over a >60 yeah life span is so much in favor of pumped hydro, it's not even a contest. I think it might be worthwhile to invest more into pumped hydro technology, for example to find economical ways of reducing land use for a given storage capacity. There's a somewhat in

For example, pumped-storage hydro is good for very large amounts. For medium-sized amounts, especially transient spikes, Denmark is experimenting with (PDF) dumping the excess production into district heating

You're completely missing the point.You're advocating greater centralization of power storage/generation,they're advocating for decentralization of power storage/generation.

The Big Idea is to reduce reliance on the power grid.It doesn't have to be the most efficient, as long as it's efficient enough.

Molten Batteries [wikipedia.org]
I was surprised to learn that the concept behind molten batteries originated in Germany with the V1. MIT and Dr Sadoway have a battery system that is supposed to be available 2014. If it was invented in Germany and has since been used for ICBMs and ordinance. Seems odd that it has taken almost 70 years to come full circle.

China will do what they did with solar, which is acquire western tech, and then subsidize and dump on Germany.

If Germany really wants to do this right, they will block ALL energy storage from China. Heck, the fact that they manipulate their money against the Euro and USD should be more than enough of a subsidy to trigger this.

Germany has more exports by value than China. People are surprised by that but actually it is simply because they didn't get into a race to the bottom. Germany knows how to complete with Chinese low cost manufacturing.

Where would you put this set of battery cells? I'm guessing it's not going to be something the size of a car battery... probably won't be able to store it in the basement in case it floods or the attic due to weight. So do German's have a extra space in their garage for something that may take up the floor space of a water heater or furnace?

I keep a very clean and organized garage and I'd have trouble storing another lawn mower or installing another water heater/washer/clothesdryer.

Solar has a good chance of being a very large industry in the future. Germany continues to advance, giving themselves an opportunity to be the world leaders in the industry -- the place where the skills, infrastructure, funding, supporting know-how (legal, financial, etc.) are all concentrated, like Silicon Valley for IT.

Meanwhile the "conservatives" in the US continue to obstruct progress here for political reasons, as part of their universal anti-liberal crusade. By loudly denying any idea that at any point was associated with liberals (including climate change and alternative energy), they will somehow change the facts and make conservatives "right".

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese were intent on being the world leaders in HDTV. They poured the equivalent of billions of dollars (which was a lot more money back then) into R&D of HDTV broadcast standards and transmission and display technologies. They showcased their impressive work at expos and technology conferences around the world. So what happened? Why aren't we all using Japanese HDTV standards?

Like standard definition TV, the system they developed was analog. Around the 1990s, digi

Who knows, it could very much end up a repeat of HDTV, with some new photovoltaic chemistry coming out of some little lab which renders all previous PV technologies obsolete.

That certainly could happen, but the HDTV comparison is misleading.

With television, you have compatibility issues -- the receivers and the transmitters have to work together, otherwise the technology doesn't work. Therefore when the television stations decided to go with digital transmission, all of the analog gear became useless because it could only process analog signals that were no longer being transmitted by anyone.

Solar panels, OTOH, don't need to be compatible with anything except the sun. If I bu

In order to really be useful, Germany would have to store at least gigawatt-hours of power. This huge solar peak they have during the daytime needs to be distributed at least into the evening hours, and ideally into the morning of the following day.

Distributed solar makes sense, at least partically because the loss of efficiency due to zillions of small power generation points more-or-less balances out with the gain in efficiency because the power is consumed near where it is generated, thus eliminating transmission losses.

Distributed power storage makes a good bit less sense. Charging and discharging batteries is - depending on the situation - somewhere between 60% and 80% efficient, dropping as the batteries age. The batteries will have to be replaced every few years, which further decreases the efficiency. Gigawatt-hours of batteries - we are talking - rough estimate - around 20,000 tons of batteries per GWh. That a lot of nasty chemical, not to mention manufacturing and recycling costs.

Frankly, Germany would be better off selling excess electricity to the Swiss, who then pump their lakes full [wikipedia.org], and then buying that electricity back when needed. This is around 70% efficient, and a hell of a lot friendlier to the environment.

the loss of efficiency due to zillions of small power generation points more-or-less balances out with the gain in efficiency because the power is consumed near where it is generated, thus eliminating transmission losses

Transmission losses for a traditional central power plant approach averages only 7%, from generator to electrical outlet. It simply is not a major source of inefficiency.

Frankly, Germany would be better off selling excess electricity to the Swiss, who then pump their lakes full [wikipedia.org], and then buying that electricity back when needed. This is around 70% efficient, and a hell of a lot friendlier to the environment.

There I agree with you. I defend batteries as not necessarily being the worst things, but hydro storage is better. Best is if you don't have to use pumped storage. You simply shut off (or at least cut back) hydro generation during the day and let the water build up in the reservoir, then use it at night or during unusually cloudy weather (a

AFAIK the problem is economics. The Swiss hate the German solar initiative, because it reduces the demand for their hydro power when the prices are highest during the day. Nighttime electricity prices are much lower. It would be nice if they could come to some sort of an economic agreement. It'd be worth it to the Germans to compensate the Swiss to some extent, because the Germans could save money on batteries.Sorry, that is nonsense;DHydro power, especially pumped storage, is mainly used as "balancing energy" (sorry, no dictionary has the right english term for "Regelenergie").So it is always payed well, regardless of "germanies solar power". Before germany had "solar power" we used coal. That means Switzerland is losing nothing due to our switch to solar and wind.In fact they win. Because NOW we indeed buy energy from Switzerland as "balancing energy".

It would be nice if they could come to some sort of an economic agreementWe have such agreements already, otherwise the trade between the EU and Switzerland would not happen...

"balancing energy" (sorry, no dictionary has the right english term for "Regelenergie")

Your English translation is close. We usually say "load balancing" [wikipedia.org].

Before germany had "solar power" we used coal. That means Switzerland is losing nothing due to our switch to solar and wind.

No, unless the economic arrangements have changed recently, the Swiss now sell balancing energy at night, when prices are lowest and solar production is nonexistent. Obviously with solar you don't need to buy much balancing energy during the day. Because coal plants can the same output day or night, in the past the Swiss would mostly sell balancing energy during the day, when demand and prices are highest.

In older times, Switzerland did not sell any balancing energy to germany. As germany has a grid that can balance it self.And right now Switzerland is not really selling balancing energy... they sell simply energy. Load balancing is done locally in the grid usually (that means in the german grid).

Obviously with solar you don't need to buy much balancing energy during the dayOfc you do. The more "fluctuating" energy sources you have, the more demand for "load balancing" you have. That does not mean you need

Frankly, Germany would be better off selling excess electricity to the Swiss, who then pump their lakes full [wikipedia.org], and then buying that electricity back when needed. This is around 70% efficient, and a hell of a lot friendlier to the environment.

They already do that with us here in Austria. They sell excess electricity to us, we pump Danube water up barrages with it, and when we need power, release the water over turbines again. Part of what we generate, we sell back to the Germans. Good deal, both sides are satisfied: the Germans with a place to store their excess kWh, we with cheap power.

Frankly, Germany would be better off selling excess electricity to the SwissThat happens already. However we have right now two problems. Most wind production is at the coast in the north and we lack grid capacity to get it to Switzerland. The second problem is that Switzerland right now has not the storage capacity. But they are working on it. The long term goal of Switzerland is to be the central european pumped storage hub.

Distributed power storage makes a good bit less sense Ofc it makes sense. The po

I own a house in Germany, unlike most readers here. To be clear, the money from the KfW is a loan, not a subsidy. The subsidy, if there is one, is that most KfW loans are interest free for the first 10 years.

The irritating thing to this home owner is that there seems to be no end to home improvements that our German government would like for me to implement. Be it tripple-paned windows, foam insulation, solar heating, solar power, and now batteries. And my house is barely 20 years old. I'm not against somebody who wants to put all these things into their home, but for this home owner, none of these things make any economic sense - even with a zero interest loan. This home owner has decided to do exactly nothing. And that in and of itself saves the environment a lot of waste.

Those who advocate taking energy storage down to the building or subscriber level are living in a dream. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful dream! But this €20,000 unit cost will not magically come into existence. Those who envision lithium or (eventually it comes down to) lead acid batteries to the point where their effect is even detectable at grid scales are proposing an environmental nightmare in the manufacture and mass deployment of such things. Which thankfully will not come to pass because the investment capital is not there.

I go with solutions that are massive, central, run by the same people who (reliably) supply your electricity, and do not rely on evil large multipliers of objects constructed from rare earth elements or poisonous heavy metals.

I like the idea of kinetic energy storage solutions because if they were massive, centrally located and well constructed, the components would be mechanical parts that might have a smaller replacement cost than an equivalent amount of battery technology, whose chemical composition changes with age. It also fits well with my assertion that we should convert our long haul energy corridors (and generation facilities along those corridors) to native HVDC for a true inter-connected continental (and ultimately global) grid.

The German people deserve credit for what they get right. For some reason the Germans have always seemed able to unite and take on massive projects more quickly than other nations. And I suspect their technology will be first rate in this new adventure.
Now imagine how easily most of the US can do the same. We are drowning in sunlight over a great portion of our nation. The potential of states like Florida and Texas to gather sunlight is remarkable. Most days we wish we had a little less solar light here. And we have plenty of wind and tidal energy as well. But unlike Germany we are a people at war with ourselves and our institutions and we simply can not push forward at all compared to Germany. Common resources such as wind, solar and tide seem to be shunned while things that cripple common resources are highly sought after here.

Most fuels are "100% renewable" on a small scale. It's when we use more of it than can practically be produced in the same amount of time, that it becomes non-renewable. Wood is no exception. If a non-trivial number of people did the same as you, the price of wood would spike, and there'd be no way to grow it quickly enough.

Methane (natural gas), biodiesel, and others follow the same pattern. If we don't use much of it, it's cheap and can

I know that tiny tech india (http://www.tinytechindia.com) sells steam power plants specifically for home power generation. Now, they are shipping from India, so if you don't live nearby the shipping costs will run into the hundreds of dollars. HOWEVER, they sell them so cheap that even with the exorbitant shipping, it's cheaper than buying a locally made steam plant, as most modern made "Classical style" steam plants are usually intended for either large scale industrial use (READ: Expensive) or as bo

The problem, as always, is that's it not "just a battery", but "battery with charger with load monitor with safety protection with replacement batteries every few years", which greatly adds to the cost.

If it was easy to store electricity efficiently, we wouldn't need all this "always-on" peak demand power generation. We'd just store everything generated at night already and then release it the next day.

Fact is, as soon as you get into storing electricity, you're into massive efficiency drops.

Efficiency matters a lot when you're in the burn-fuel-for-power model, because you can always just burn the fuel tomorrow if you need to have the power tomorrow instead of today. For wind and solar power, the power is available when it's available, and you can either consume it, store it, or waste it. Ideally you'd have a proper smart grid (not the kind that's being marketed, which is just a power meter with WiFi) so that you could have things like fridges and freezers run their compressors during supply spikes and leave washing machines and so on programmed to run whenever there is surplus power. In the absence of being able to trigger demand when you have supply, storing it inefficiently is probably better than wasting it.

That said, the majority of my electricity consumption when there is no solar power available is lighting. It would be great to have a DC main with a relatively small battery that could power LED lights overnight. It would probably also let me charge electronic devices more efficiently than going via DC.

The problem, as always, is that's it not "just a battery", but "battery with charger with load monitor with safety protection with replacement batteries every few years", which greatly adds to the cost.

Perhaps this would be a use case for nickel-iron batteries? They have an extremely long life; the reason they fell out of use is because of low energy density and poor charge retention. But energy density matters much less in your crawl space than it does in your tablet or your car, and for this use, being able to hold a charge for only a few days would be fine.

The point is, in the most basic system, you'd expect to discharge the batteries every night.

Certainly not!At night energy consumption is super low, going down to 35% - 37% of daytime consumption.You discharge the battery over daytime, at peak fluctuations. And you charge it again, during daytime.

At night energy consumption is super low, going down to 35% - 37% of daytime consumption.

Residential demand actually goes up when school lets out, and stays up until after dinner--which includes both late afternoon, and some time after dark. The utilities' peak demand is more during the day, but that's because of office workers...

You discharge the battery over daytime, at peak fluctuations. And you charge it again, during daytime.

Which makes charge retention even less of an issue, which was my original point.

Not holding a charge mean wasting energy at the end. It is like drilling a giant hole into a hydroelectric dam at the end.

NiFe batteries self discharge at a rate of 20-30% per month. If they're fully charged, during the day, they'll lose under 0.5% of their charge by the time you start charging them again, which seems a pretty adequate loss - you'll lose more than that in the charging and discharging of pretty much any battery type. Remember, we're talking about very short-term energy storage here.

It sounds like a great use for nickel-iron. Unfortunately the nickel content makes them expensive. Of course the nickel can be recycled, so it's essentially a one-time investment. It's be interesting to work out the economics.

The grid and the power plants _are already very inefficien_! But you accept it. Now as we talk about batteries (I'm not really fond about this idea) you suddenly come up with _inefficiencies_... thats pretty lol, imho.

Lead-acid batteries are quite easily recycled. Granted, you have to take care due to the lead - then again, the other batteries have similar problems. On the other hand, they're quite simple: Lead, sulfuric acid and that's about it. No exotic materials.

although lead acid are one of the most easily recycled battery, and certainly common, less than 40% of the material is recovered

Cite? I find it hard to believe that applies to the lead.

even the most efficient country in the world, agriculturally, australia only gets a slight return from the sun with about 0.9kJ of oil per kJ of food produced

Do the sheep account for much of that efficiency? I would think that livestock grazing on large expanses of open land (which aren't artificially fertilized or anything) would be very efficient from that PoV. How does New Zealand do?

Generalizing is always wrong.
No government has 100% failure rate at anything.
That said, a subsidy aimed at reducing the technological debt is very helpful in introducing new technology and competition.

yeah, it is not like coal, oil, nukes, hydro, trains, planes, space crafts, cars/roads, electrification, telephony, etc ever got a hand out from a gov, esp. the American federal or state govs.

You forgot natural gas, the US government funded the development of fracking, I just read about cotton, where the government developed anti-wrinkle technology that reputedly saved the industry from new synthetic competitors around 1950.

Also, didn't we give the financial industry a couple of bucks the other day? Health care? Every defense-related industry?

It makes sense for gov. to help new industries get started, but I do not like how they do it. far better ways to do so.
BUT, the financial industry is the one that burns me. We should NOT have bailed them out. Instead, we should have allowed them to crash and then picked up the pieces and re-built many new banks or better yet, credit unions.

Citation needed. You see there is this thing called investment, which may or may not have a return, but investors (such as governments) usually invest in things they expect to have a positive return. Some corporations do it as well, it's just that their shareholders don't always like them making investments with long-term payoffs. I don't think this is a new thing for Germany, and I see no evidence of them failing economically in the past, or now. They had a brief period in the 30s when their economy went t

No it isn't. The grid is many power stations tied together. There have been incidents where that interconnection itself has been a problem due to ripple effects of one power line failure (e.g. the Northeastern blackout of 2003), but that's technically solvable. As for local transmission line failures, the problem is poor practices (overhead lines instead of underground) and poor maintenance (e.g. lack of tree trimming near overhead lines). Most countries spend more on power line maintenance than the US, and

"What I'm waiting for is swapping the prices of day and night electricity prices. In the summer "peak" demand has shifted to night time by now."

Until this happens, storing solar generated energy is just dumb. At the moment my panels help me in 2 ways:-it lowers my electricity demand for a year by about 50%.-it saves about 10% on the price per kWh since I send energy to the grid at peak rates (0.22 EUR/kWh) and almost exclusively use offpeak (0.20 EUR/kWh)

Nothing, until there's many so people dumping power into the grid that buying it from you at the fixed market rates becomes economically unsustainable. That's what is happening in Germany right now; utilities are complaining at having to buy this power and having no place to send it (we in NL have been buying it on the cheap, not that the consumer will notice this on their bill, but still). Since the utilities also have to run regular power plants for peak loads, their costs have soared. Electricity in Germany is expensive these days.

Unless they come up with a viable storage option, either in the home or in the neighbourhood, I expect the price of the power you sell back to the grid to drop sharply in the coming years.

Germans are taking back their electricity grid, so of course the utilities are upset. There is pressure on local governments to re-nationalize the grids in whole cities, and some power stations. Why pay the power company's profit when you can just own it all yourself, optimize it for your own benefit?

In the short term it will be expensive, but in the long run it will be cheaper. It's good that Germans seem able to see beyond next month's wage packet.

When my windfarm produces more power than the grid demands, I either can (if I still have the capacity) pump water into my pumped storages, or I can disconnect a part of my windfarm from the grid, or I can use my smartgrid and load car batteries, or other batteries.

The cost of electric power is dynamic and depends on contract: during peak hours it might be unwise to start my washing machine as it will probably draw power that is expensive, but it might be quite cheap to load a

For solar power, centralised is actually less efficient, because of the extra steps to high-voltage networks, transport, and similar steps down to 240V.

Depends on what you mean by "centralized". No grid is actually "centralized", all of them are distributed and with multiple sources (although with vastly more sinks, of course); in this sense, a grid with solar inputs could take advantage of the fact that when there are clouds over one part of Germany, perhaps they aren't over another part of it. The transmission losses can still be lower than energy storage losses (not to mention energy storage costs).

Which is a different kind of disaster waiting to happen. Lead batteries provide about 40Wh of storage capacity per kg of lead. Germany has 40m households, and their average electricity consumption is 10 kWh per household per day. Which means that if, statistically, every household wanted to be able store one day of electricity consumption (which, arguably, isn't enough if you go 100% wind/solar, but anyway), you'd need 10 million tons of lead -- about one annual world production of lead, roughly as much as is contained in all car batteries worldwide combined.

And private households only consume 1/3rd or so of all the electricity produced in Germany (businesses and industry consume the other two 3rds).

AFAICT from this, the whole thing is a total non-starter. It will never scale up to any significant number of homes. A few percent of the households (mostly rich home owners) may do it, collect Government support and feel good about saving the environment. The overall effects will be inconsequential -- so much so that the whole project wasn't worth starting in the first place.

Germany has 40m households, and their average electricity consumption is 10 kWh per household per day

What the heck? Are you sure about that? I'm one person, I use about 15 kWh a day on my own, and I'm a fanatic miser. I don't leave a single light on except the room I'm in at the moment. Practically all my lights are CFL or LED. I don't have an electric stove, clothes dryer, or water heater. Those are huge pigs; most people have all of those. I am a fanatic about not holding the refrigerator door open wide o

The whole point of a central power system is optimization and they are doing the opposite.

No, the point of a central power system is economy of scale. But, unlike coal or nukes, solar PV doesn't really benefit from economy of scale. Most batteries don't benefit much either. By decentralizing they avoid the transmission losses, and avoid some of the capital expenses of the grid. But there is a BIG drawback to decentralized power generation and storage: it will be harder to tax.

Ditto! Liquid metal (aka: molten salt) batteries are NOT about thermal storage, they are for storing electricity. You (the GP) are thinking of the molten salt systems used in concentrating solar-thermal power plants (aka: solar tower). Check dmbasso's link (above) for more info on liquid-metal battery tech.

Dr. Sadoway has been working with Khosla Ventures the last few years, commercializing this stuff. They expect to begin beta-test field trials with customers next spring, and hope to be in full production by the end of 2014. Khosla is also backing a compressed air solution that uses a sort of water carburetor to achieve isothermal compression (solving an old bugbear of compressed air, the loss of energy to heat).

In short, there are robust, inexpensive storage solutions in the pipeline. (And not a moment too soon.) This will radically alter the "landscape" of renewable energy. When you can couple dirt-cheap solar PV with dirt-cheap storage, you have a recipe for rapid transition.

wind is already cheaper in America than everything except for hydro, geo-thermal, and nat. gas (and in that order). And in some places, they do not have much of those 3, but have wind, so those areas are in fact, ordering wind. Even here in Colorado, Xcell is installing multiple nat. gas power plants, but they are installing several new wind power parks because they KNOW that nat. gas prices will go up.

And as to batteries, eos energy storage is already the lowest going, and they are below the costs of a

You're preaching to the choir. Note my implied criticism for the typical libertarian's very selective complaints about government subsidies. The Koch brothers don't complain much about government subsidies for oil, do they?

Somehow nobody noticed that temperatures have not gone up in 16 years while CO2 levels climbed. So much for this new pagan religion.

Some people understand the importance of not drawing conclusions about long-term trends from short-term measurements in the presence of noise, and avoid cherry-picking the start date for their trend lines.

Yet another paragon of scientific insight. I've read more than enough of those denialist sites to understand the two basic strategies. First, find something stupid somebody said (today's example is Typhoon Haiyan), and act as if that debunks the whole theory. Meanwhile, back in reality, most climatologists are extremely vocal about the fact that no one weather event can be blamed on AGCC. The other approach is to cherry pick a few examples of noise defying an overall trend. It would only be suspicious if y

Also at EU 20-28k, you can pay for decades of electricity usage, and that's not even taking into account maintenance. Waste of money.

Decades only at current prices. Prices having been increasing significantly over the last few years and that trend does not seem likely to change any time soon. If for EUR 20K you can lock in your energy prices for the life of the system (also measured in decades), then you are very likely to make significant savings over that time.

For example, according to UK Department of Energy and Climate Change figures, electricity prices have risen by 63% since 2005, and by over 250% since 1987 (considering 25 years

If they have risen in the UK, it's due to poor government regulations and taxes. In the US, electricity prices have fallen significantly since 1988 in constant dollars, and unless people like Obama destroy the economy and energy market, they are going to continue to fall..

Furthermore, you are paying a significant opportunity cost on the money; you'd likely have gotten a 250% return if you had invested the money since 1987. And even if PV were worth it, you'd probably be better off waiting a few years for a

Germany was dizzed by the US, for selling so many goods. I know that's because the industry fears...

Other European countries complain about that a lot more than the US, and for good reason. For all that I admire German industry in many ways, Germany has had a mercantilist policy for decades. The Plaza Accord in 1985 dramatically reduced the German-US trade imbalance because it forced Germany to stop manipulating its currency. More recently, the Euro is beloved by Germany because they can run a trade surplus which doesn't get balanced out by movement in the exchange rates. European financial difficulties w